GOKAAAAI... SILVER!
I think the simple problem with the MLP comics is this: they have too many writers and arists.
On most of IDW’s other books, they’ve got maybe 3, 4 writers per book at the MOST, although most of the Transformers comics have exactly one writer per specific book (examples, James Roberts being pretty much the sole writer on More than Meets the Eye and Lost Light), and maybe 3-4 artists that occasionally rotate with each other per book and have fairly similar art styles. So you have much more consistent quality and they’re mostly pretty solid even if sales aren’t always the best.
MLP? You’ve got like 12 different writers and like 8 different artists, all of whom have wildly different styles and different ideas about things. So the quality varies wildly from issue to issue, not helped by the fact that most stories are stand-alone multi-parters. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but most of the multi-parters have nothing to do with each other, hence the “stand-alone” part. Most other IDW books, however, have long-running, continuous story-arcs that build on each other, and sometimes cross over to different books in the particular franchises. But they work more closely with each other to make sure everything lines up correctly, and – most importantly– they have editors who actually give a damn. At least nowadays anyway; back in the early days of IDW’s Transformers license, they had Denton Tipton as the main guy in charge, who’s approach to continuity was essentially, “Who gives a shit?” And then you had stories like All Hail Megatron which killed the momentum of the previous story arcs in favor of something ENTIRELY new, with contradictions up the wazoo and Shane McCarthy shilling his pet character Drift, who’s a classic case of a character who was written better by other guys once the creator of the character left. But I digress.
With MLP, however, you’ll frequently have issues and storylines contradict each other, sometimes even within the same issue, and Bobby Curnow just doesn’t seem to care.
To put it simply, MLP has too many cooks.
